Brick Mansions

The wonderful thing about movies is that they seem to be able to stop time, and the painful thing about them is they don't have that power, not really. And so we watch "Brick Mansions," the last film completed by Paul Walker, partly thinking about the fact that he's not there anymore, that he died in November in a car accident.

The movie itself makes that impossible to forget. There are cars all over the movie - car chases, car crashes, crazy driving, a scene of Walker hanging from a speeding car, and even a scene of Walker and another guy going 80 miles per hour when the brakes and the steering give out. Apart from that, there's just the awkwardness of looking at someone onscreen and knowing more about him than he knows about himself. In a sense, everyone who has ever made a movie invites that - the day when the future looks back and knows all - but usually the future is slower in coming and doesn't arrive so jarringly.

But "Brick Mansions" itself is partly to blame, too, because it doesn't provide much in the way of distraction. It's just a bad movie (details to follow). What's more, it's better today and for the next month or so than it will ever be again, because a certain sympathetic awareness of Walker - an extra pleasure in his good-guy aura and his sly humor, an extra appreciation of what is gone - is all this movie has got. There's nothing else.

"Brick Mansions" is part of an otherwise good trend in recent action movies. It's a French American collaboration, written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the authors of "Taken" and "Taken 2." Perhaps demand has exceeded capacity at this point, as the director's megaphone was entrusted to first-timer Camille Delamarre, the editor on "Taken 2." He doesn't get much to work with: Even stretching out every fight and every chase for as long as he can, the movie still feels stretched at 90 minutes.

Things start off silly and end up laughable and ridiculous. The setting is Detroit in 2018, in a blighted section of the city, a housing complex known as Brick Mansions, that the government has abandoned. There, a ruthless drug kingpin, Tremaine (Rza), provides most of the jobs and structure for the residents. How bad is he? Every so often he'll kill somebody just to underline a conversational point.

Meanwhile, there's an acrobatic French ex-con (David Belle) on the scene, too - there always is. He keeps stealing kilos of drugs and destroying them, because he believes they're poisoning the community.

Paul Walker enters the picture as a cop on a special assignment - an assignment so preposterous that I almost wish I could tell you this in person, rather than write it: The mayor asks him to find and disarm a stolen neutron bomb. You know neutron bombs? They were all the rage, circa 1980. It's a nuclear device that kills people but leaves buildings intact.

So what we get in "Brick Mansions" is the story of a cop teaming up with an acrobatic French antidrug ex-con to disarm a bomb, while also trying to rescue the acrobat's girlfriend from the drug lord. Along the way, Walker and Belle are shown getting into two gratuitous fights (with each other), and there's at least one long chase that goes nowhere. Anything to pass the time.

Unlike the "Taken" movies, "Brick Mansions" gives us no clear villain - it keeps changing villains on us - while providing no absolute, definite goal for the hero. Instead, the goals are diffused between two heroes. The cop has his bomb. The ex-con has his girlfriend. Neither the bomb nor the girlfriend carries much emotional weight.

But it gets worse. Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

Let's hope "Fast & Furious 7," which he was filming when he died, makes for a better goodbye. It opens early next year.

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